Shakespeare's Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body (Palgrave Shakespeare Studies)

Shakespeare's Entrails explores the connections between embodiment, knowledge and acknowledgement in Shakespeare's plays. Hillman sets out a theory of the emergence of modern subjectivity in the context of a world that was increasingly coming to see the human body as a closed system. Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 8 List of Illustrations......Page 10 Acknowledgements......Page 11 Introduction......Page 16 Early modern bodies......Page 18 Psychoanalytic enclosures......Page 26 A brief history of entrails......Page 30 Topographies of doubt and belief......Page 38 Dissecting anatomy......Page 47 Religious entrails......Page 51 Staging guts......Page 55 Shakespeare’s entrails......Page 62 Descartes and the scene of scepticism......Page 69 The Matter of Troy......Page 74 The satirist and the cannibal......Page 81 Cannibalism and silence......Page 90 3 The Inward Man: Hamlet......Page 96 The closing of the father......Page 102 The eating of the father......Page 110 Hamlet’s ‘Nerosis’......Page 117 Aporia......Page 124 4 The Body Possessed: King Lear......Page 134 Exorcisms......Page 137 Inhabitations......Page 144 Possessions......Page 151 Dispossessions......Page 159 ‘No bourn’......Page 168 ‘In the between’......Page 179 Coda......Page 186 Notes......Page 188 Bibliography......Page 248 Index......Page 268 "Shakespeare's Entrails explores the connections between embodiment, knowledge and acknowledgement in Shakespeare's plays. Drawing on psychoanalytic, philosophical, historicist and literary-critical methodologies, the introduction sets out a theory of the emergence of modern subjectivity in relation to the changing attitudes to the interior of the human body in the Renaissance. In the context of a world that was increasingly coming to see the body as a closed system, previously dominant notions of human relatedness based on entering the other's body or of having one's own inhabited by the other became deeply problematised. The book examines four plays - Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, King Lear and The Winter's Tale - in detail, interrogating the ways in which each intersects with the historical and epistemological faultlines set out in the introduction and outlining a trajectory of the relation between embodiment, scepticism and belief in Shakespeare's plays."--Jacket

David Hillman's new book focuses on a vital area of contemporary Renaissance scholarship - that of Early Modern notions of embodiment and selfhood. The book imagines the Shakespearean corpus from the inside out: it explores the preoccupation with the body's interior spaces in several of Shakespeare's plays, focussing on how these plays address questions of knowledge and acknowledgement: on the ways characters imagine being within the body of the other, or having one's own body inhabited or possessed by another.